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Today I will write very little.

But a lot of watching.

At the highest level, the video above can be seen as a primer for any Proselytizing… ahem….Evangelization program.

Furthermore, and more importantly, this is basic information that all the Faithful should know.

So grab a nice chilled bottle of Chardonnay or a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon, kick back and savor the next 1 hour and 9 minutes.

It will be the best investment of time you will ever make.

h/t to Fr. Z. – see here

Update 05:00 9 September 2016

God, this is so good.

You will read this and you will like it!

Here are some gems:

Stefan Molyneux:

Universalism, which is really the foundation for philosophy. If nothing can be universalized, there is no such thing philosophy or science or math or any of those kinds of things. Universalism is the key to philosophy and in fact, under the Catholic Church in particular, but in Christendom as a whole, universalism was extended to humanity for the first time, at least that I could dig up. But because n the past there was Aristotle saying, you know some men are only fit to be slaves and should not have the protection of the laws and the rights of free men and so on. But in Christendom there was great concern over the universality of ethics (…) because all souls are made in the image of God and there should be no compulsion in religion, and so there was great sensitivity in the 16th  century for the rights of the native Indians who were being somewhat abused at times in the European settlement let’s say of North America. There was foundations for international law and the Catholic Church in particular was very positive towards science for the most part, funded science and was a great patron and advocate of science. The Catholic Church founded the university system which I guess we can see in your video all around you in Canberra.

The idea that REASON, or I guess what was called “logos” is intrinsically part of the divine nature of the Christian belief, is something that was very much buried in the education that I received.
And last but not least, the separation of church and state had its origins in Catholicism and I guess last but not least but one, ECONOMICS. There was a strong tradition of economics that founded the …. not the labor theory of value, which is Marxist fallacy, but the SUBJECTIVE value… theory of price, that price is something that is SUBJECTIVELY valued and can’t be OBJECTIVELY measured by labor input and so on, came out of the Scholastics in the 12th and 13th centuries and there’s a fairly direct line through that of the Austrian School of Economics of the 19th and 20th centuries.

So to take a short speech and make it even shorter, it seems to me that a lot of the history that I was taught is… I don’t know what’s the nicest way to put it… a little one sided, a little limited and the degree of respect that the Catholic Church and the other Christian churches and denominations had for Aristotle, you know, they called him the Philosopher and he was considered to be …. of course he was not a Christian, he was the pre-Christian thinker by hundreds of years. And the idea that reason and science and universality is the way you approach the mind of God, was something that I really had not been exposed to at all. In fact, I had been exposed to quite the opposite, which I guess is what happens when you read those who win one particular battle, you get just one side of things.

(…)

Dr. Duke Pesta:

What Christianity offered metaphysically, and I think we can stipulate that metaphysics, even if there is no God, whether God exists of not, the idea of metaphysics is certainly one that has been important to philosophers. And as you said, I think that metaphysics is really the, in many respects,  the underpinning of universalism. If you can’t talk metaphysically about a subject, then there can be no universality. In fact, I would argue, the more modern culture, post-modernism has rejected essences, universals and absolutes, the more absolutely chaotic and destructive to the idea of truth itself things have become. Philosophy in the modern era has become more or less bankrupt. I  mean, most modern philosophy is really now just a recap of what happened before. There’s very little new thinking about truth and about right and about wrong and aesthetics and beauty.

(…)

And what people fail to recognize is that one of the subjects that the universities covered was natural philosophy, which we would call science. The rather progressive thinkers of the Church hierarchy who put these universities in place, certainly they stressed theology, the study of God as the queen of all the arts and sciences. But never the less, there was a place carved out for the study of the world.  The argument being that if God created the universe, and God gave us rationality, then there is no rational reason that we can’t study it. And out of that effloresced .. you wouldn’t have had… this is the point I make, you couldn’t have had the enlightenment, you could not have had it, had it… it had happened only in the West primarily because there was a primary strain of tolerance for REASON and for abstract thought that was not Christian within Western Culture itself, that then gave rise to that. So I am not trying to suggest that Christianity if the only intellectual way to do anything, but of all the world’s philosophical traditions, Christianity has got some pretty serious intellectual chops, and I think ignoring that, as we so often do in our kids education, turns religion into a caricature.

(…)

[Explanation of Francis, bishop of Rome]

What you call this animanistic principle, we call paganism. Right? I think the real argument here is between paganism and monotheism. And the way monotheistic  religions, primarily Christianity and Judaism before the modern age, a little bit more Islam, moved the ball in the direction you mentioned. And I think, .. in my mind, in the modern world, with all of our technology, I don’t believe we are creating more atheists, I really do think we’re harkening back to a paganistic world view. If you think about all the rhetoric of the “global warmers” , about how mother earth, gia is being destroyed by her children. We should nurture and protect her. If you think about how the modern progressives …or even Obama declaring for president between two ancient Greek pillars and all those pictures they had on Time magazine in 2008 when he was running with the sort of halo behind him, with the lights, there is a real sense… or, or it’s the rise of the Nietzschian superman right, that transcends all morality, a certain kind of immortality in that. And so, if you think about paganism, the argument than to me in history swings between… you’re either going to have some sort of a monotheistic system or more likely you are going to have a pagan one. And the very inconsistencies you mentioned in paganism are exactly right. IT’s what happened when pagan Romans deified pagan men as  emperors and gods, those contradictions fell to pieces.

Update #2 06:30 9 September 2016

Answering the “who am I to judge” question.

But stepping back to the free will question, I think it’s absolutely important. I think you’re exactly right. I think the problem is bigger than maybe we’ve states so far. It’s not just that people are “economically determined”. We’ve got a major problem here where you either … increasingly from the biology, the biological sciences, the argument is coming that we are all genetically programmed, we are genetically determined. Your angry, you’re happy, you love, you hate, simply because you’re put together that way. You’re a pedophile simply  because your genes put you together… there’s this new movement on now to declassify pedophilia  as just one more alternative sexuality right like homo… I think we’re going to get there, too.  So the idea that we are all genetically determined, then you can’t hold anybody accountable, you can’t really punish people, you can’t JUDGE them.

The “determinist’s” violation of the law of non-contridiction.

Well of course this argument that comes out of the left that there’s more material, environmental and cultural economic determinism flies out the window when they come across ideas that they find oppositional. At which point they wish to ban them and they wish to drive them away and they call people racist, sexist and homophobic and misogynistic, all of which are moral judgments that depend on free will and they… fall apart in that whole area.

Francis, situation inside “Sacred Vatican Walls” and “power”

It’s the jungle. It’s back to the jungle. And this is the thing for me. When you remove the idea of God, again, the reality of God is we’re going leave to the side, it’s a matter of faith, you take the idea of God off the table philosophically, you remove that as a possibility, you always, it always goes back to the jungle. It always comes down to power. Look at our universities. These supposedly civilized, sophisticated places. They’re not. They’re places where power trumps everything. What Black Lives Matter ‘s looking for, what the feminists are looking for on campus, what the neo-marxists … they are not looking for equality. They’re not looking for dialogue. They want power. They don’t want to level the playing field, they want to flip it. That’s what they’re after here. And the idea of God was so valueable, as the idea of God progressed philosophically, from let’s face it, the pagan understanding of God, like you said, it’s really kind of simple minded, it’s a kind of superstitious animism right, it’s … and that’s what’s coming back now. We’re not creating more atheists here, we’re creating more pagans. Whe’re paganizing culture by getting rid of God.      

Update #3 09:15 9 September 2016

One more…

Why Christianity is THE option for the secularists?

Christianity, as a philosophy, is rationally correct to me in this regards and it’s an important regard. Christianity argues that every human heart is capable of good and evil. Every human being is capable of better and worse, right and wrong, true and false. That is a hallmark of Christian thinking. It’s true of classical thinking as well but it’s the hallmark of Christian thinking. Since we jettisoned that, notice what’s happened here. Some people are pure hearted and others not. We no longer believe that everyone is capable of evil. If you’re African American for instance in a university, said you cannot be racist because the power structure is against you. If your poor, you’re the 99%, you can’t be greedy. It’s only that 1%. What’s happened now that we jettisoned Christianity, … not only are you jettisoning the soul,  not only are you jettisoning transcendence, not only are you jettisoning free will, you’re also jettisoning this idea that we are all, in our hearts capable of choosing one way or another. So we have entire demographics now who are innocent no matter what they do. Other demographics, white privilege studies that we’re teaching kindergartners now, no matter what you do, if you’re Caucasian you are guilty of all this litany of sins. This is regressive. This is not progressive.  This is anti-rational, not rational. This is racism and bigotry masquerading as progressivism. And there is no excuse for it other than the fact that they have more power now in many of our cultural institutions than the preceding Christian… Judeo-Christian world views do. And it’s a power thing. We won, you lose. So effectively the progressives are telling you: you suck it. You’re white, your guilty, you’re black, your innocent… your rich, you’ re evil, you’re poor, you’re a victim. This is what we’re doing now across culture.

All the things that classical liberalism used to fight against, now they’re embracing. Discrimination, segregation, all this stuff. Keeping people apart from each other, reducing people to their gender, their sex, their skin color, that what they’re doing now in the name of progressive rationalism. Things that a simple reading of the Gospels, regardless whether you believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God or not, a simple reading of the Gospels should tell you, you can’t do it. It took us 2000 years to abolish slavery in the West. And we did it. Most of the abolitionists in the 19th century were Christians. Because their world view demanded it.

You have nothing corresponding on the rationalist’s side. When I find these reasonable people who don’t believe in anything  insisting again and again and again it’s rational to love your neighbor, I ask them why and they never ever have an answer. They always default… and tell me you never heard this Stefan, they always default to the cultural contract or the social contract. We agree not to hurt each other, because in the long run, we can work together. Well that works when you’re on this side of things, but what if I’ve got all the cards and you don’t?  Why should I give them up for you at this particular moment it’s the jungle mentality. I can take it from you. The Hitlers and the Stalins and the Maos all use the social contract to gain power, and when they gain power, what do they do? They took it away from everybody else. It seems to be the norm when you look at how these things play themselves out culturally.

And here, Dr. Duke Pesta destroys Francis’ JunkTheology:

The modern world, absent all the things that have gone away, you know, God, faith, the superstructures of theology and belief, the modern world wants absolute freedom without any consequences. And those are the two things that you can’t have. If you sum the bible up, you sum the whole of Christian tradition up, you sum more or less the whole of world religion up, theology up for more or less 5000 years, it comes down to that, doesn’t it. That you can’t be free and be without consequences in your culture. In that they don’t go together. You can be free and without consequences, or you can have consequences and no freedom,  but they don’t go together.   And the story of Christianity, the story of Christ is the story of genuine freedom comes from a recognition of consequence.  And call it heaven, call it hell, call it carrot/stick, call it true false, call it life and death, call it the jungle versus civilization. All those are fair. The reality is, as we’ve talked about today, can they exist in the current climate. Everything tends towards the jungle now.  Nothing tends towards the consequence, so I’m like you.

I don’t see, maybe they will, maybe reason will conquer in a 100 years. Maybe they’ll come up with some formulaic way of doing it. Maybe they’ll be able to medicate people into behaving them the way they want them to be. But then again, should that day ever come, we’re back to the dystopia right.

To which Stefan Molyneux answers:

No free will.